


Lanwe

by alexgaretti



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Elder Scrolls Online
Genre: Aedra, Alessian Order, Nenalata, Original Character(s), Original Character-centric, Valenwood, ayleids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-28
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-16 16:01:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5831833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexgaretti/pseuds/alexgaretti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The King of Nenalata is dead, or so they say. He disappeared months ago, fighting the Direnni with Emperor Ami-El's army in the frozen mountains of the Reach. Meanwhile a coup in the Imperial City has brought life to a standstill for much of Tamriel, and the Legion to the ancient skysteel gates of Laloriaran's city.</p><p>To historians and diplomats it is either the end of a long slide towards war or the start of a bright new future. But for four people far away in another country it is a more personal crisis. They all have scars to show for their time in the great City of the Shining Waters, but some have healed better than others.</p><p>COMPLETED</p><p>-- A stand-alone short(ish) story about some of the characters from A Life of Strife and Struggle: Nenalata. It covers the years between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of Laloriaran Dynar's memoirs, but from a very different perspective, and explains a bit of background. No spoilers, and not necessary to understand Part 1 or the future Part 2 of ALSS. --</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The King is Dead

Sometimes you’ve woken these last few weeks to see him sitting in the window, staring at what you know is the Lady: Nenalata’s stars. On warm summer nights like this you almost miss the old country. There is nothing like a Nibenay sky; a Nenalatan night, with the scent of orange groves and the market below the cascade of jumbled houses. The crickets outside could almost be cicadas, the great plane tree could almost be that old cork oak in the courtyard of your tenement. He sat in that window too, just like this one, although he was singing or joking with you. Always drunk, always happy. It can only have happened three or four times but somehow you know at the end, when you say goodbye, it is what you will remember of him.

‘You’re going to go, aren’t you?’

‘No,’ he says, but he doesn’t even turn to look at you. ‘Of course I’m not. I’m going to stay here with you.’ He is silent for a while, you watching him, him watching the stars, but then he adds; ‘I can’t go back, anyway.’

The latest captain coming in from Anvil told him that the Aran of Nenalata died on campaign: somewhere called the Reach. From what you’ve pieced together – market place tittle-tattle, women’s boasts about their husbands’ business – the current Dynar (no-one can remember which number we’re on) disappeared somewhere deep in the snowy wastes of Skyrim, a prisoner of that gang of mercenaries from High Rock. Which no-one cares about, of course, because he has also been declared an Enemy of State by this new Empire. The really important thing – the thing which is keeping you up at night instead – is that there has been a coup in the Imperial City. That mannish cult. You forget its name. They don’t like the Aran. Well, you thought, they aren’t alone. But it is going to mess up the shipping, and you’ve got orders to fulfil.

None of this was learned from him, of course. The first sign something had happened was that he ran in through the front door of the house. No: burst through it. Tears streaming down his face. Crying like a girl is something you’ve had to learn to accept, embarrassing as it is. He stood in the middle of the front room – the entrance hall, he insists – staring at his hands as if unsure what to do next. Then he thrust his fingers into his hair, pulled at it, bellowed like an animal in pain and ran into the garden.

You turned to the Boiche girl who does the silver, staring after him like she’d seen a demon fly in through the window. ‘I’m going to go out for a bit. If he wants some supper, give him something plain.’ You picked up your favourite scarf, the bright orange one, like a bride’s. ‘Keeps the elements balanced,’ you added, commiserating yourself in advance.

When you came back, intelligence gathered, he was still in the garden. He had his knees pulled up to his chest and his bright turquoise eyes were ringed with bloodshot red. He heard your steps on the path and looked up into your face, full of emotions no-one ever taught him the names of. Well, you didn’t have time to start teaching him them now. Things were worse than you could have imagined. You sat down beside him on the little stone bench, balling the scarf into your fists, and picked up his hand in your own.

‘I know what’s happened.’ He looked round at you quickly, and you deliberately did not look back at him. If you looked at those eyes you would find it hard to recite your plan. ‘I’ve heard everything. Now, if we move quickly things won’t be-‘

An explosive, bleating sob hit your ear, just before his rough soldier’s hand wrapped itself around your neck and his hot, wet cheek collided with your brow. ‘Lanwe!’ he moaned. ‘Lanwe! Oh, Spirits! Oh my stars and the Ancestors. Oh Spirits!’ He stroked your hair, pulling it out in tickling fronds. ‘What am I going to do?’

‘Well,’ you said, catching his other hand as it pawed at the collar of your new dress with the little silver birds, ‘I’ve already spoken to the harbourmaster’s wife at Velyn, and she reckons that he can invent something about customs checks so I can stall the Hadras Brothers –'

‘I am so far away!’ he went on, ‘I am so far away and he needs me more than ever.’ He pauses, flings his head back, and bellows at the sky; ‘ _He_ is so far away! Spirits! Beyond the Jeralls! No-one should ever go beyond the Jeralls!’

‘Ondarre.’ You tried to extract your hair from his fingers. ‘Ondarre –' You prized his hands from your breast and returned them to his lap, but he kept on sobbing. ‘Ondarre!’

You stood up, turned and stood over him like you were telling off a naughty dog. There had always been something faintly absurd about this Nenalatache house with this Boiche garden. There are several of them now, popping up like rashes wherever there’s a colony, but it doesn’t make it less absurd. Now it was more absurd than ever with this mighty and beautiful man sitting in it, half-drowned by a rosebush, his woman berating him.

Without warning the fear and pain evaporated from his face. You recognised that look and you dreaded it, because it meant only one thing: clarity had dawned.

‘I shall go back. Go back to Karanenya. I will do whatever I can. He is out there. He needs me.’ He stood up too, now, looking about him as if he left his wits somewhere in the flower beds. ‘I shall look for him! I shall go to the Reach!’

‘You don’t even know where the Reach is, Ondarre!’ That name, too: that name is absurd. _Ondarre._ The kind of name your father used to mock your brother with when he wouldn’t get out of bed. _Is weaving too low for you Ondarre? Going to ruin your fingernails, Ondarre?_

‘What will everyone think about me?’ he exclaimed, tears filling his eyes, jabbing at his breastbone. ‘What will everyone say? That… Order – no, the whole Legion – will be at the gates by now. At the mighty skysteel gates of Nenalata! If I leave now I can be there in, what? A month? Yes, a week to the good road, and th-’

‘No-one will say anything about you!’ you shout over him. ‘No-one will say anything about you because no-one here cares! They can’t even spell Nenalata. They can’t find it on a fucking map, Ondarre. And you are an Exile. They’ll kill you on sight, or did you forget that small detail?’

‘You do not understand! You couldn’t understand!’ He makes one of those lovely old-world Ayleidoon gestures of complete, incapacitating misery. ‘I am a Pelin of Nenalata!’ he roars at nothing in particular.

‘What?’ you ask, spreading your arms wide, appealing for sanity from an imaginary audience. You enjoy playing the grown up with him. But then you hardly ever fight. The only fights you have ever, ever had are about this. Whatever you call it. _Nenalata_ , for want of a better word. ‘What are you going to do? Assuming you aren’t killed, of course. Because what’s happening has been in the air for decades and you know it.’

‘I do NOT.’

‘The place is a nightmare. It’s just that place fulfilling its destiny if you ask me. Nenalata is the largest and most beautiful tomb in Nirn.’

His face falls, and his lip quivers. ‘That… That is exactly what Laloriaran used to say.’

That name again. In your head Laloriaran is not the same person as the Aran of Nenalata. You long ago realised that idea was far too strange to live with. He’s just Ondarre’s friend. Well… _“Friend”._

‘If even the King of a place thinks it’s a lost cause, then…’

‘But he would have _ideas_ , Lanwe. He would know that and still have _plans_.’

You look at him, his bright eyes beseeching you to believe too.

‘Would these ideas be better or worse ideas than you kidnapping a boy with a bounty on his head?’

He gave you a reproachful, wounded look: don’t mention the boy. Do not drag the boy into this. The boy has suffered enough. That boy, you thought to yourself: he needed the back of someone’s hand. Not your sweet, idiotic man fussing over him.

‘Look: all I want is for you to be free, to be happy. You made it out alive, and so did I, and so did the boy. You don’t owe them anything, and beyond that…’ Let them all burn, you said to yourself. ‘It’s not for us to question the will of the Spirits.’

‘I don’t presume to know the will of the Spirits, Lanwe, and neither should you. All I know is that there is no-one else to look after him, and he’s not good at looking after himself.’

He was talking about the Aran, you assumed. ‘He’s dead!’

‘He’s fucking not!’

After this, things followed their usual course of events. You avoided each other for a day or so. Then you both tried to be too nice to each other. Then you made love. Then you made love again in the middle of the night, this time without the pleasantries. Normally that would be that. But this time there is something that won’t go away.

You caught him looking up at the Lady about two weeks ago. You surfaced from your sleep and could tell you were alone in the bed. So you opened your eyes and there he was. Crying. Softly, so as not to wake you. You felt awful, watching him weep on his own, but he is right: there is no way for him to be able to share his grief with you without it hurting you and frightening you.

For all that, you are growing tired of this. There is something bigger at work here, something like a loose tooth that you cannot help but push against.

‘He’s dead.’

Two luminous eyes - Ayleidoon eyes full of starlight and horror - blaze in the darkness at you. Wordlessly he stands, crosses the room, and disappears into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I only managed a week without posting, but I sort of wrote this one as I was finishing off ALSS: Nenalata and had it in the can to go. Hope that it doesn't disappoint and that it picks up a few of the loose threads that are waiting to be woven back into the Unoffically Offical Memoirs!


	2. A Road Out of Haven

When you boarded the blackship to Haven you still weren’t well. It was as if that old hag of a woman had reached inside you and taken your soul when she tipped poison down your throat. More than once it occurred to you how true that might be. There were priestesses from up north who swore that a woman’s womb was the seat of her soul, just as the cock is the soul of a man’s. Your mother and her friends always laughed that off as hill country superstition – no-one in Nenalata thought their own ideas were superstitious – but you had no other way to explain the emptiness inside of you. Or the pain.

Niliye got ill just after you put in at Senchal. The two of you made a wretched pair, all lank hair and cold sweat, and for a moment you wished that you had let the Aran use you as his "test case", pride be damned. But then no, you thought; you had seen the value of pride during those short months when you were in love. Pride seemed to be the big difference between you and him, the thing you found that you weren’t looking for. In the end, Niliye rallied quicker than you did.

In Haven you showed the agent the Aran’s letter. Apparently you were a faithful servant who’d caught marsh fever. It had seen off your husband and now it threatened to see off you. The Aran himself had written the letter, it seemed, because the agent raised his eyebrows at the handwriting and whispered _‘Arangua Adonai’_ – My Noble Aran – as he read his instructions. He can’t hear you all the way out here, you thought, so save your breath. You tried to square this mer’s Noble Aran with the cold, shifting eyes and hawk-like face that had studied you in the Palace. The Dynar had been massive, aloof, forbidding, and yet if you hadn’t known the stories about him you’d have called him awkward too. Shy, even. Somehow a little afraid.

On the ship over you heard the gossip about the Aran and Ondarre. It was something you couldn’t begin to make sense of: he had seemed utterly in love with you. Had it been a lie? How can your heart be so sure of something untrue, unless you’re mad? To the sailors these passions of the Pelinia were somewhere between high drama and low farce. All you knew is that he had never been wholly yours, and therefore he had never been yours at all.

Perhaps that is why you only lasted two weeks in the agent’s mansion at Haven. Polishing and curtseying wasn’t something you’d been born to, of course, but now it all seemed even more tawdry than before. There had been a small part of you that had hoped if you stayed put one day he might come and find you. As you packed your few belongings up in the middle of the night and crept out of the courtyard, Niliye’s little hand in yours, you still hoped he’d come for you. But find you gone.

You walked north, into the Grahtwood. The weather was still getting warmer and the height of the year had yet to come. You and Niliye slept in the cheapest inns you could find. When there were no inns you slept under a blanket, a little way from the road. Well, she slept. You snatched half hours of dreamless rest, arms clamped around her body. In the years to come you would marvel that no harm came to either of you, but at that point you were innocent of what was out there in the trees. Until two months ago you had barely set foot outside the massive white-gold walls of Nenalata and then only to swim in the Silverfish. Now you were alone in a forest so huge you didn’t believe it had an end.

As you moved further from Haven and the Library at Elden Root, further from the colonies with their stupid made-up names – Twyllvarlais, Narilmath – the less of your own sort you met. That was fine, strange as it was to always be the tallest person in a room. Few of these places out in the forest depths would welcome a Nenalatache with open arms, even after all this time. Old wounds hurt the most, as your father would have said. Some places were alright enough: trading posts and the overflow of large Cyrodiil cities. Some were outposts of mad cults, strange clans and petty tyrannies that had fled the slaves and each other. In the end, though, here you all were together, no matter which side you’d chosen.

It had been nearly a week since you saw another Ayleid when you came upon the little town with its market place and neat row of shops. It was a surprise to see Ayleidoon bustling from trader to trader. Later you were to learn that these were agents from Belarata, Abamath and even Ilayas. For now all you knew is that you were a long way from anywhere, but in a market important enough for wealthy colonists to make the trip. And that was exactly what you were looking for.

You sought out the drapers and fullers, sizing them up for their customers and their wares. Eventually you chose the one with the red sign and the most expensive-looking people coming in and out. Inside, the shopkeeper – a small man even for the Boiche with a bald patch and a permanent wad of jerky in his mouth – took in your muddy hem and your worn sandals with suspicion as you looked about for the smallwares and haberdashery.

‘I weave,’ you announced. ‘These.’ You held up a bunch of the ribbons and tapes hanging from the ceiling. They were nothing special: local work. ‘Give me silk: I show you.’ You spoke little Boiche, and you’d never done this before, but you had no choice but to be brave.

Ayleidoon silk weaving is renowned throughout the world. It only happens in the great workshops of the Palaces, not like linen and wool. You had been one of the hordes of girls and women who wove all day in the vast open rooms. Your father had shown you how, then you’d been sent off with your mother as soon as you were housebroken. Small hands: delicate work. Your mother never got over the humiliation. Before the Slave War your family kept a human and she kept the business in the black – just. Then your mother became the drudge, the resource to be used up. Then you.

You remember peering up through the high window to the Outer Court one hot day and seeing a tall, beautiful girl as she waited for an escort. She was a few years older than you, perhaps seventeen or so; just beginning to become a woman and effortlessly poised. Your heart leapt when you saw she was wearing the fabric you had only finished last week: teal blue with silver glyphs of the House of Dynar. It streamed from her head where it had been pinned to her lustrous black hair, a veil to keep the sun off her long, delicate neck. She was the Aran’s niece, his ward, the future Arana of Nenalata. At the time it was the proudest moment of your life. She was the most beautiful thing you had ever seen, and only she could do justice to your silks.

Now, after this summer’s misery, you think that it was all alright for her, wasn’t it? She’d never had to make a sacrifice; she’d never gone without something she needed. The Slave War had ruined your family and ruined your chances of making a decent match, but the Arpenia still somehow found themselves on top. As ever.

‘You’re an Ayleid, incha?’ the Boiche said. It wasn't really a question. ‘You worked in a Palace? Which one?’ He took the wad of jerky out of his mouth and considered you for a moment. ‘I know all the patterns, you know. I’ll know if you’re shitting me.’

‘Nenalata.’

The little Boiche stopped flicking his bone beads and put his hands on his desk. ‘Fourteen lengths,’ he said, holding his fingers up just in case: two full hands, four fingers. ‘Two thirds pay. And you buy the silk thread off me first.’

You shook your head. ‘Ten lengths.’ You held your hands up: ten. ‘Same pay. Better work.’ Because it was true: you could do better than anything he had.

‘You really worked for the Palace down there?’ he asked, clearly wondering if he could spin some sales patter out of it. You nodded, although it’s been decades since you darkened the door of that workshop: you reckoned that the Aran and his Arana owed you that at least.

You gave him the money for the silk thread. Then you haggled as best you could for a loom with the very last of what Ondarre gave you, and headed back to Niliye and your dank little room. It had to work out, or you’d both starve.

The thought was strangely thrilling to you.

 

You did well. Better than well: the little Boiche was elated, though he was too good a salesman to show it. You liked that – it was a good sign. It’s what a trader should be.

It wasn't good money, but it was your own. For the first time in your life. The Boiche weren’t as fussy about letting and renting as the Nenalatache. Few people are as fussy about anything as the Nenalatache, you were beginning to realise. You took a small, dilapidated house – a cabin, really – on the edge of town. It was leaky and bat-infested, but it was out on its own. No-one would find you there, no-one would trouble you. You would bury down into the woods and disappear and nurse your anger and humiliation. Perhaps you’d get over it. Perhaps you wouldn't. Either way it’d only be your business, yours and Niliye’s, and the world wouldn’t hurt you anymore.


	3. Gold, Turquoise, Blood, Porridge

Mornings were the worst time of all that summer. You could feel the sun already up and on your skin, and you would get the same rush of excitement and hope you always did those last few months in Nenalata. There would be boredom and there would be frustration today, there would be chores and washing and Niliye to prattle at you, but there might be a letter, or a poem, or some sign from him. Sometimes it was just to say that he was thinking of you. Sometimes it was to say that he was going to slip away tonight. Then there would be wine and honeycakes and the sort of sex that no-one had ever told you could happen and you never dared hope existed.

But then you would remember that there would be no letter, no poetry, no wine and no sex. It was just boredom, washing, weaving and children, and no-one to talk to. The world had turned its back on you. But you had to carry on.

After what felt like many mornings but in reality was a shorter time than you knew, things got better. You stopped hoping. The sun grew less hot, and that reminded you less of home. The leaves began to turn bright orange, and that was something you’d never seen before, not on this scale. It made you think that the future might have some surprises worth holding on for, things better than the past. So you would make your trip every week to town to sell your piecework and pick up food and soap, and you would feel a welcome sort of numb.

And then there was the autumn afternoon when you came home to find a tall, handsome man of your own kind sitting at your only table. He was wearing the golden, feathered armour of a Pelin of the Southern Nibenay, and he had dark hair, dark skin, and his turquoise eyes were livid with wakeful nights. The door was unforced, the windows still sealed: he must have walked straight through the walls of your house. In the moment before you realised that it was him – it was really him – the old fears kicked at you like a reflex. Before you could scream for help or mercy he raised his finger to his lips.

“Shhh.”

You followed his gaze to the little window seat you made for Niliye. There on the thin cushions made from sacks was a boy of her age, not so much asleep as passed out from exhaustion.

_How?_ Your eyes asked him. _Who? Why?_

He just smiled, imagining that was explanation enough.

Unsure of what else was to be said or done you set some water to boil on the fire, while he started the long process of stripping his armour off. Neither of you spoke. There was a time when you’d have eagerly helped him, or insisted he kept some of it on, or insisted that you wear his helm while you both – drunk, giggling – tried to make love as discretely as two people who think they are falling for each other can.

When the fire was stoked you turn back and see that he was asleep. Like the little boy, he had simply keeled over where he sat and was snoring gently. His innocence offended you.

Giving him a shove you hoped was painful, you whispered: ‘What are you doing here? How did you find me?’

It took a moment for his eyes to focus on you. ‘I’ve been Exiled.’

‘Exiled?’ The implications of that word fluttered around your head like a flock of birds. They were birds you’d tried hard not to disturb from their roosts those last five months. When they settled, you thought first of Niliye. ‘You can’t stay here.’

His face was blank: it was clear he hadn’t heard or didn’t understand. ‘May I use your bath?’

‘There is no bath.’

‘No bath…’ He tried to make sense of that through his exhaustion. ‘But I reek.’

‘That’s why I’ve already boiled the pan. Go out into the yard and scrub yourself down.’

You watched him from the window. Perhaps he knew, perhaps he didn’t care. All it took was the flash of his honey-rich flesh, the black hair that traced a path from his chest to the hollow of his loins, the muscles working beneath his skin like the threads and heddles of your loom, and you were filled with everything you had thought you had left behind in Haven; lust, desire, hope, hatred and sadness.

It was then that you noticed the beard.

You also noticed a new scar on his flank, and it looked fresh and unhealthy. Later you learned that he almost got captured by mercenaries from Rimmen. ‘Nasty place, the desert,’ was all he said, wrinkling his fine nose at the memory. You supposed they would have tried to sell him and the boy back to the Aran.

‘Isn’t this just charming?’ he roared when you come out to hand him something for the infection in his wound. ‘Just look at the little house! It’s like something from a children’s tale, Lanwe! How idyllic, and how rustic, all ruddy-cheeked simplicity. Just lovely!’ You wanted to tell him that it wasn’t idyllic or simple fixing the roof all by yourself, or raking out the bat droppings.

‘And you are like a nymph of the woods,’ he added, with a goatish look in his eyes. You picked up the pitchfork and begun flinging his horse’s dung onto the cabbages.

 

That night you heard a soft knocking at the trapdoor to the loft you and Niliye shared. You burrowed down into the sheets and shut your eyes tighter.

 

‘When are you leaving?’ you asked the next morning.

‘Oh,’ he said, looking surprised, then looking over at the boy. ‘Oh, _leaving_ … Well, I had rather hoped you might look after him.’

‘What?’

‘Yes,’ he smiled, heaving a massive forkful of bacon onto his plate and pouring great quantities of porridge on top of it: you’d never seen anyone eat so much ever. ‘I mean,’ he laughed, ‘I don’t know what to do with a little boy, do I?’

‘Didn’t you think about that when you kidnapped him?’

‘I didn’t kidnap him, I –' He stopped himself short, and put down his spoon. ‘I haven’t lived in a home since I was twelve. I wouldn’t know where to begin. He’s a little boy. He needs a family around him.’

‘So take him back to his then!’

‘I can’t!’ He leaned in and whispered; ‘They’re dead.’

‘ _Dead_? Listen, for the last time: who is that boy?’

He stared at you with a reproachful look. This had all been such fun up to now. Then he shovelled a gigantic spoonful of bacon and porridge into his mouth. ‘He’s the heir to the House of Adaesi,’ he said as he chewed.

‘The Commander’s clan?’ He nodded. ‘What happened to the Adaesi, then, and why do you have the Commander’s son?’

He flung the spoon into his bowl and pushed his breakfast away. ‘Laloriaran killed them,’ he muttered into his beard.

‘Lalor…?’

‘The Aran,’ his deep voice rumbled, his patience thinning. ‘Aran Dynar. How do you not know about that?’

‘I live in a wood in Malabal Tor!’ you exclaimed. ‘I never wanted to hear the word Nenalata again in my whole life!’ He looked surprised and shocked. ‘There is no way in Oblivion he’s staying here another night, then. Whatever that tyrant may want with him - whatever you’re running from - he won’t find him here. When you’ve eaten get your things and saddle your horse. Get out of here and never, never come back. I wish I’d never met you, you selfish bastard.’

You had been thinking that like a prayer or a mantra all summer. It felt good to finally say it.

He was breathing hard and staring at you. His reflexes were much quicker than yours, unnaturally quick; by the time you were pulling your arm away he’d already grabbed hold of it.

‘Lanwe.’

He was not shouting, and although his grip was iron-strong it didn’t hurt. ‘Lanwe: look at him.’ You tried to pull away from him and screed up your eyes. ‘Look at him.’ You opened them just so he’d let you go, but you did look at the boy over by the fire. He and Niliye were playing some strange game only children understand with feathers they had found in the wood. They were laughing. It had been a long time since she laughed.

‘Think what you like of me, think what you like of Laloriaran, but he needed me and now I need you to help him.’ He let your arm drop. ‘I’ll only stay until I’m feeling better, but please can I leave him here with you until I’ve worked out what to do?’

You nodded carefully, and he nodded back, and then he shovelled another mouthful of porridge into himself.

‘Is the beard…?’ You wanted to tell him it was horrible. It seemed rude, though, strange as that was to think.

He put his spoon down again and stared into the distance. Then he sighed and said, ‘I am in mourning. I am in sorrow.’ He looked up at you and his brilliant eyes seemed to be searching for something hidden within you. That look was a memory you treasured and then loathed in turn all through the summer.

‘It’s horrible, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He thumped his palms down on the table, and the dishes jumped. ‘I’ll go outside and shave it off.’


	4. Erothea

One night the following week you came back late from town; there were quibbles about the order, quibbles about the pay, quibbles about everything. Your feet were sore, your fingers were sprained and swollen from your work, and you were so tired you were on the verge of tears. There was a light on in the little cabin.

‘ER-O-THE-A!’

Someone was singing: a deep, male voice. It was his voice. It wasn’t even clear which tune it was supposed to be, and when you walked in the door you realised why.

‘ER-O-THE-A! Get up my love and dance!’

He had a child on each hip and was whirling them about the little room as they squealed and giggled and clung onto him. You winced as Niliye’s black curls grazed the wooden beams.

‘ER-O-THE-A! We live but once in this false world: enjoy it while we can!’

You were filled with fury that came from nowhere. You pushed past them, squealing and giggling to each other, and climbed the ladder to the loft. You let the trapdoor bang shut, and you started to pull the returned rolls of ribbons out of your basket. You counted your losses on your fingers through hot, stinging tears.

‘Ama!’ Niliye’s voice called out below you. ‘Ama! Come and dance with us, Ama!’

‘Now, little one...’ His words were barely audible; his voice was more a rumble in the air through the wooden floor. ‘Your Ama would much rather be dancing, but she has things to do. Best leave her, yes?’

I’d rather pull my own eyes out with fishhooks than dance with you, you thought to yourself.

You didn’t really count anything, you just ran numbers and worries through your head. After a while you heard a rapping on the trapdoor. You ignored it, but then it came again, followed immediately by his head. He began by looking the wrong way: he’s wasn’t allowed up here, so he’d never seen how things were laid out.

‘You’re feeling better, then?’ you said, without stopping whatever you weren’t doing with the ribbons.

He frowned. ‘The children are tired. Little Niliye’s already asleep. Can you swap with them?’

‘I’m tired too, I-'

He’d already gone, reappearing an instant later with the girl hoisted with one arm, the other bracing himself against the ladder. He kissed her on the head. ‘May Mother Mara watch over you, tiny darling,’ he whispered as she stirred. He brought the boy up, repeated the business about Mara, and beckoned you to follow him down the trapdoor.

‘You mean that I am unwelcome,’ he said, when you both reached solid ground.

‘I didn’t say that, I didn’t mean that. Just that you said you would leave when you felt better.’

‘But leave the boy with you.’

You didn’t look him in the eye. Silence is always taken as agreement, isn’t it? There was no need to speak.

‘Lanwe: this is your house. I am your guest. I didn’t mean to offend you.’ You stopped trying to hide behind your hair and your shawl and looked at him. He was right, of course, but hearing those words coming from his mouth, falling on your ears: it was absurd. Then he added, ‘But…’ and stared up at the trapdoor.

‘What?’

‘Lanwe… They’re children. They’re scared, they’re lonely here, they’re so sad. They need to play, to have fun. I was just trying to –‘

‘They do play. They play with each other. I’m busy putting food on the table for them, but I don’t apologise for it.’ You had never thought you’d dare speak to him like that, but this was too much.

‘That’s not what I… You won’t even let Niliye go out to the town.’

‘It’s not safe!’

‘I’ll take them!’

‘You’re leaving!’ You stamped over to the window seat. It had become the unofficial place for his armour, his sword and his shield, all neatly laid out. You seized the sword and picked it up, staggering a little; it was impossibly heavy for the way that he twirled it about. You turned and dumped it into his arms. ‘How dare you come here and tell me how to run my home? Before you showed up in my kitchen I was happy: me and Niliye. Just the two of us. And you would never have come to me if it wasn’t going to help you play the hero. I’m just the backdrop, I’m just dust on your sandals. I could be anyone.’

He looked like you’d given him a slap around the face, his arms cradling that massive sword. He knew you were daring him to deny it. Instead he shook his head. ‘No, you weren’t happy: not then and not now. You were miserable.’

‘If I’m miserable, it’s because of you! I have lost everything because of you.’

‘You did what you did because you chose to, Lanwe. You said you loved me and you know I never forced you to do anything. And,’ he added, spreading his hands as if using your little cabin to demonstrate his point, ‘I’ve lost everything now too.’

‘So why don’t you care? I care! I’m angry!’

He shrugged. ‘I do care. I think I do, anyway. I’m not sure yet. But I do know I couldn’t have done otherwise, so...’ He clearly wasn’t interested in being angry, not on his own behalf or on yours. ‘Why did you tell me you loved me, Lanwe? Why, if all you need is you and Niliye?’

‘Because I’m young,’ you said but you could feel your voice beginning to crack. ‘I’ve never been anything but someone’s wife. You’ve never been anything but a beautiful, rich little boy. I wanted you to notice me, and I wanted you to say you loved me too. I was stupid and I thought I knew what love was. But neither of us have any clue what love is, do we?’

He had no answer, and he should have done. You broke down in tears.

‘Lanwe.’

You pushed his arm away, shook your head at him hard and felt the tears fall harder than at any time since Nenalata.

‘Lanwe.’

He put his sword down gently on the window seat again and held his hand out to you.

‘Dance with me.’

‘Fuck off.’

He offered his hand again.

‘Dance with me. Dancing’s important.’ His hand was still there. ‘More and more I don’t understand the world, the people in it scare me. I have no idea what love is or is not. But I do know that dancing is important. And the things that go with it. Wine. Singing. Laughing. Friends.’

You hiccupped your tears back down your throat. ‘How can you even think about any of that?’ He caught your hand in his and held it aloft.

‘" _Erothea_ ,”’ he half-whispered, half-sang, ‘"Let me hold you, let your heart guide your steps.”’

‘You’re a fucking idiot,’ you whispered back viciously. He grinned broadly, and began to move his feet to the absent beat that you could both hear inside your heads.

‘" _Erothea_ , get up and dance with me, my love.”’ His hips were behind your buttocks now, and you could feel them nudge you into the steps of the dance. His hand was upon the base of your belly, and his breath was on the back of your neck. You could feel those muscles that run from his loins across his hips as they flexed against you.

‘"We live but once in this false world; enjoy it while we can.”’

 

 

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Every time his body pushed into yours the table thumped against the wall. He shouted in triumph. You laughed with delight. It was insanely, voluptuously, wonderfully loud.

Bangbangbangbangbangbangbangbang. Plaster fell in your hair, your eyes, your mouth. You couldn’t get the rhythm of your breath again. You were so close…

Bang.

Bang.

‘Oh my stars and Ancestors! Hahahaha!’

BANG.

But afterwards, when you were wrapped in each other’s arms panting for breath, you both began to weep.

You never felt anything at the shrines and the temples. You never felt the Spirits move you when everyone else was whirling and wailing for them. You only ever played along. If you have ever known peace or mercy to be given or received it is at times like this, and it scares you. It shakes you, it makes you deeper and broader and braver. It feels like you are falling, and that flying and falling might be exactly alike.

 

The next morning you could barely keep your eyes open. He was like a soul reborn. He roamed about the room trying to find anything and everything edible, then he settled down with a cup of beef tea and hummed happily to himself. You gave up on doing any real work, and pretended to tidy your threads. In the cold light of day this was not so straightforward. Not by any means. You weren’t quite sure why not, but it wasn’t.

‘Uncle Ondarre?’ Niliye asked in a sing-song voice, trailing the boy behind her like a puppy. ‘Uncle Ondarre, were you helping Ama put up shelves again?’ He looked up from reading his book and peered at her through the smoky gloom of the little hut.

He beamed at her with a perfect set of aristocratic teeth and poured more beef tea into his beaker. ‘No, little one!’ he insisted. ‘No, of course not.’ You were surprised but thankful for his tact; the girl had had enough to chew on recently.

‘We were making love! Now, boy,’ he smiled across the steaming cup at his little ward, ‘Before you know it you’ll be a man, and if I can give you one tip when pleasuring a woman –'

‘Out!’ you shouted, jabbing your shuttle towards the front door. ‘The pair of you!’ The children scuttled off, alarmed by the look on your face. You tried that look on him. It had no effect whatsoever.

‘What is wrong with you? Were you raised by dreugh?’

‘More or less,’ he smiled, settling back into his seat again. ‘I was raised by the Pelinia of Welke. It’s not far off.’

‘It can’t ever happen again.’ Oh Spirits, yes: that was the answer. Clarity at last.

‘It can. Who says not? What a strange thing to say,’ he chuckled, shaking his head at your bizarre ideas. ‘You love having sex with me!’

‘Shut up.’

‘It’s alright, you know; you don’t have to feel bad.’

‘Just shut up.’

‘ _I_ can’t resist _you_.’

‘I don’t want you, I was just drunk.’

‘No you weren’t. I was. You weren’t.’

‘I was tired, I meant.’

‘You enjoy me.’ He buried himself in his book again. ‘You do.’ He’d still got his cup of tea in the other hand.

‘It's not that simple.’

‘It is.’

'It's not.'

'It is.'


	5. The Sulk

Those first weeks of optimism and laughter and passion were all too brief. He began to irritate you in ways you could never have dreamed of when you were making love in the sticky city heat of Nenalata. He had never really been a person to you, you realised. He was a fantasy; a rich, handsome nobleman from a song or play. His life was supposed to be magically better than yours; no worries; no boredom; no poverty. You were discovering you didn’t want him to be real. You didn’t want him struggling to be useful in your world.

That is not to say he was useless: he went hunting, which was very welcome. You hadn’t had fresh meat for months before he arrived. Word got round the area for his ability to find exactly what he was looking for and even the Boiche – proud woodcrafters though they may be – asked to come along. He always refused though, and you suspected there may have been something uncanny about the whole thing. There usually was with the Arpenia. He took the boy with him, and he offered to take Niliye. You never said yes at that point, making out that it wasn’t right for a girl to go running about in the woods. He guffawed long and hard at that, saying that someone called Relle would have your eyes. You didn’t mind his mockery; the truth is you were suspicious of what he’d show her.

But there were many ways in which he hindered rather than helped.

One evening you came back to find a deer carcass strung up from the eaves outside your front door. Its neck had been punctured, its belly was sliced open. You recognised your one and only wooden bucket – the Boiche used leather – sat beneath the body to catch the blood. There was a large, claggy pool of the stuff down there.

‘Where is the pail?’ you asked, knowing the answer already but you wanting to hear it from him.

He looked up from reading that damn book of his, shrugged and took a bite of his apple. ‘I’m collecting blood in it.’

‘Why?’

‘Me and the boy are going to make _siliine_ with it.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a traditional campaign dish of the Pelinia. Red beans soaked overnight with crushed garlic, thyme, bergamot, lotus seeds, brandy, chicken livers, moon sugar and oyster mushrooms. Then you boil it with the blood. Except we don’t have any lotus seeds, brandy, moon sugar or chicken, so we’re going to put a lot of fish sauce and that fermented milk in instead.’ He beamed proudly. ‘It’s the only thing I know how to cook.’

‘What about my pail?’

‘It started to smell. We need to buy another one.’

‘With what money?’ He blinked up at you, face blank. ‘You need to wash it, that’s what’s wrong.’

‘Wash…’ he said slowly. ‘Wash it,’ he repeated, as if trying the sound of the vowels out. Then he went back to reading his book.

The next day, when he’d let the hens run off through the gate yet another time, you lost your mind and – Pelin be damned – you tried to hit him while he scoffed last night’s leftovers.

‘Stop!’ Your fist hung suspended immobile in the air. ‘Stop!’ He took your hand in his own and started to uncurl it. You were too astonished to complain.

‘If you are going to hit someone never, never keep your thumb inside your fist,’ he explained. ‘By all means fold it across your fingers – like this – but don’t do that. You could break your thumb.’

‘Show me!’ insisted Niliye, holding her little hand up to his face. He laughed, and curled her fingers into a ball. ‘Let me hit you!’ And she thumped her fist on his leg, sideways on.

‘No, no, no, little one!’ he laughed. ‘Come up here!’ He lifted her up onto his lap and, curling his huge hand around her tiny one, he guided it towards his jaw. ‘There are several points to aim for, Niliye, if you want to shatter your opponent’s jawbone…’

‘Niliye,’ you said, slamming a plate of mashed beans down on the table in front of his face, ‘We don’t hit. Nice little girls don’t hit.’

‘Your Ama is not a nice little girl, then, is she?’ he whispered in Niliye’s ear, and tickled her until she was hysterical and you had to put her to bed.

 

There was no way that he was alright, of course, and you knew it. The Boiche thought nothing of the fact that he had no job, no role and no purpose beyond ambling about the woods killing things. It’s all they ever seemed to do. He, however, had been important, rich, a famous sportsman and swordsman, a favourite of a King, and now he was nothing. Although he had travelled more than you he had never left the Nibenay. The most exotic place he’d ever been was some cousin’s summer palace down in the Topal Bay. Apparently you could walk straight out of the dining room and down some steps into the sea. You never figured out why that was a good thing: it sounded damp and bad for the lungs.

You both felt cold for the first time in your lives three weeks after he arrived. The trees were becoming skeletal. You woke up one morning to find him staring at the path to the road in horror.

‘The tree has gone,’ he said.

You looked up the path, following his gaze. There were trees everywhere, as always.

‘You what?’

‘It’s gone!’ he insisted, burrowing down inside the blanket he’d flung round himself. ‘Even the fucking trees are leaving it’s so cold!’

Later, of course, you learned that some of the trees migrated with the seasons.

Then The Sulk began. Many years on you’d refer to it as The Sulk almost like it was a family pet. At the time it felt more like living with a rabid dog.

He’s not an angry man but he is a violent one. That’s an unsettling combination. None of his outbursts were ever aimed at you or the children. They weren’t really aimed at anything. The misery came first, in fact, and the wakefulness, and the silence and the way he absentmindedly tore at his fingernails until they bled. Eventually you saw his rages as a sign he was unravelling, but you didn’t know that at the time. Some days you understood it: it was so cold for so long you almost wanted to tear the world apart because it hurt so much. But the violence is something we’ll get to. First we must deal with the rotmeth.

 

You still have little idea what daily life for the Pelinia looks like, but it seems to involve heroic quantities of poetry and wine. The old joke goes that if you slit a Nenalatache’s wrist blood, not wine, will come pouring out. Unfortunately, you rarely had money or time to fetch shitty, overpriced wine from the Ayleid agents who came to town back then, so you did without. He was not so picky. Having nobody to spar with or joke with or recite sad poems to he threw himself into exploring his other option: drinking. Alone, never in front of the children, but late into the night. And that meant contending with rotmeth, which is some kind of fermented gravy the Boiche brew.

‘I’m sick of drinking this swill!’ he announced. Even though he reeked of stale booze the stubble on his chin made him look even more handsome and dangerous.

‘Then stop drinking.’

‘No!’ He pulled on a heavy tunic and blundered towards the door. ‘I’m going out and I’m not coming home until I find a reliable and decent source of wine.’

You didn’t see him again until the morning after next. Somehow by then he’d got shaved, had a wash and was scribbling away at the table in a little leather notebook. When he saw you he jumped up and kissed you passionately.

‘I found some wine,’ he explained. ‘Better than that, I found someone who knows someone who makes wine. Back in the Weald. “Fine”, I said, “I’ll give you some money and you can get me a large amount of wine”. But he explained that you have to charter a whole ship if you want to get wine out of Cyrodiil. So I said, “Great, I’ll give you the money to charter the ship, and you can bring me a vast amount of wine”. And then he pointed out that if I really, genuinely have the money to charter a ship, there are lots of other Ayleidoon in Valenwood who want decent wine, and figs, and brandy, and above all tea. So I’m going to sell something and then we’re moving to Velyn.’

Of course you knew it was all a lot more complicated than that, but in his mind it really was this simple. Fine wine and delicious food materialised from nowhere in his world: we were going back to normal!

‘I don’t want to move to Velyn. It’s too close to Ilayas.’

‘We’re too close to Abamath here! And this place is shit.’

‘This place is my home! It’s what I built for myself and I am proud of it!’

‘Oh please. No you’re not, you’re just scared of going somewhere new. It doesn’t even have a bath. I’m going to sell something expensive and then we’re going to get out of here.’

You were angry. If he’d had anything worth selling why hadn't he done so before? You would have felt so much better with some gold stashed away somewhere, just in case. But something you’ve come to learn since is that to those of a certain background money just exists and will flow to them forever. Somehow that confidence means the rest of the world obliges them. They don’t hoard it: they send it out into the world like a hunting dog and it comes back with delicious things. They forget the good fortune of having money in the first place and scorn other people for not taking the same risks.

But you did want to stop working for that little horror in the drapers. You wanted to stop working altogether: that was the only reason you got married. It was reclaiming a respectability the Slave War had denied you.

‘Sell your sword,’ you said, and you meant it as a test and he knew it.

‘No,’ he said. I will not renounce my birth and my duty, he meant. I will not do that for you. ‘I’ll sell my tack and the horse. I can’t use them anyway: too obvious.’

‘Are they worth enough?’

He gave you a look that said: _you have no idea._

You saw that he was serious, and that he was really going to do this regardless of how mad it was. ‘Fine. Fine, then. But I’m coming too.’

‘What?’ he laughed merrily, pulling you down onto his lap and squeezing you, ‘What am I going to say about you?’

‘What are you going to say about any of it? I speak better Boiche than you ever will, and you know it. You know enough to order wine and start a fight, but sign a contract?’ You shake your head, and he starts to shake his too. ‘Talk about interest, customs charges?’ He carries on shaking his head at you. ‘You don’t know what either of those things are, Ondarre. You had so much money: who looked after your affairs?’

‘I had a man who does back home.’

‘A what?’

‘A _man_. Who _does_.’

You decide not to delve into what that might mean, and while you were celebrating his new found vim with a quick knee-trembler you were running the figures through your head and deciding what you could salvage from your meagre clothes chest.

He gave an extremely long and unnecessarily detailed explanation about why you were there; something to do with this being your dowry and some fictitious father-in-law whose favour needed to be curried as paterfamilias of whatever House. You left a great deal of it out when you translated it for the slippery little swindler he’d met on his binge. It was all for Ondarre’s ease of mind; the Boiche didn’t seem remotely interested in who you really were so long as one of you had coin. Now that, you thought, is a language you speak fluently.

And that is how you came to be in Velyn, or between Velyn and Ilayas. You’d got used to the woods now and could never go back to city life. You had no deposit and no references, but after another evening of Ondarre being handsome and well-spoken and very, very drunk with the owner – a spice merchant from Vanua - you were given the keys anyway. You are the one who actually runs things, of course, and you don’t call it a business. You both called it a cover-story: a nice merchant-caste couple who fell out with the Imperial authorities like so many around here. Breeding has a way of making itself known, however, even to Boiche who claim not to care ‘bout none of that stuff.

‘You’re that bloke, incha?’ the mayor said to him one day.

‘Which bloke?’ He struggled with the language, even more than you.

‘That aristocrat in disgrace. You know… The one from Lindai who ran off with ‘is wife’s servant. Got ‘er knocked up. You’re him, incha?’

‘No,’ he said, visibly disgusted at the thought. You couldn’t help but think it was slightly more respectable than the truth.

The more he protested, the more the mayor was convinced he’d got it right. ‘Don’t worry son,’ he said, winking at him, ‘Your secret’s safe with me!’


	6. Uluscant

At first the boy would only sleep if he was holding him. When they arrived this was a very good thing, because it kept him down by the fire and safely out of your bed. As time went on, however, he was getting stiff from sleeping like that and you wanted him firmly in your bed.

‘The poor child has nightmares,’ he explained. You were outside even though it was chilly, but it was the only place to talk. You still needed to keep your voices down.

‘He’s lost his mother, his father and all his family overnight.' It is typical of him that he wouldn’t have thought about this, you thought. It’s typical of men like him that they never consider this stuff. ‘He’s been abducted in the middle of the night by an armed man he’s never met before, then dragged across a desert and a forest by him. What do you expect?’

‘I know all that, Lanwe,’ he snapped. He rarely snaps. ‘I know all that because I am the one who did it, and I am the one who’s held him in my arms every night since. And you are no doubt right. But there’s more to it than that.’

‘Oh?’

In the forest twilight you could just about see his lip curling, his brow furrowing; he didn’t want to talk about it. ‘I think Adaesi intended him for the Pelinia.’

‘And?’

So he told you what that meant for a small boy of six or seven. With nerves as taut as a bowstring he explained how these children – these precious aristocratic children – are given to this ritual, and of the terrors they endure.

It sounded more like a cult to you than an elite army, you said. He said that may be true. You told him it sounded brutal, barbaric: you would never allow someone to do that to your Niliye. He said you didn’t understand, that on the other side you see it as a blessing. It is also a sacred duty, to protect the city and its people. No-one else can do the things the Pelinia can. Think of the stories, he said: think of the great heroes in the plays.

‘I know a chap who calls it opening his third eye. Which,’ he chuckled, ‘Sounds a bit saucy, I think. But yes: we live in a haunted world, Lanwe, and I can see its ghosts.’

‘Here?’ you whispered. He nodded. ‘Now? With us now?’ He nodded again. A shiver ran up your spine.

‘What do they say to you?’

He cocked his head on one side, and a glassy emptiness crept into his eyes. Then he sighed. ‘Nothing interesting. As usual.’

‘Nothing…?’ Is that it, you thought? That’s _it_?

‘They’re pretty annoying, actually, the Spirits. I try to ignore them for the most part.’

‘Ignore them?’

‘Yes. It’s work stuff. I mean, you need to talk to that horrid little chap in his shop but you don’t invite him home for supper, do you?’

You realised that this all happened to him once, and you grabbed his hand and squeezed it tightly. He looked down at your fingers, confused. ‘I am not supposed to talk of this,’ he muttered.

‘Can you train him?’ you asked, thinking now of the practicalities. Where would you get the equipment, the weapons, the space?

‘Perhaps. More probably I’d fuck it up. But besides that, I think it might be better for all concerned if he did not become a warrior, Lanwe, yes?’

‘Then what will become of him?’ You couldn’t imagine making him a weaver. Somehow it didn’t seem right. And you didn’t want him to do that. You hadn’t taught Niliye. You should have done, you knew it: four hands earn twice as much as two. But she was not going to be used up by her mother like you were.

You saw the outline of his huge shoulders rise and fall: he shrugged. ‘I want to keep him with me for a while yet. I want to try and make him feel safe in the world, you know? I can probably give him that: I owe him that. But eventually… I know someone at the Library down in Elden Root.’ Only once you had spent more time with him did you realise how unlikely a friendship that was. ‘He’d be sympathetic, keep him safe. Perhaps if I teach him to read and his languages he’ll take him on as a scribe there, a scholarship boy…’

Teaching the boy his alphabets, his languages, his grammar and his mathematics was probably a salve for Ondarre’s wounds as well. With no Barracks to swagger about in, no comrades to laugh and drink and fight and dance with, what use did this Pelin have?

That is not to say that it always went well. The boy’s fragility turned to prickliness, his silence turned to defiance. In the following summer, after you’d moved north to Velyn, you’d regularly come home to find Ondarre swinging a huge stick against a huger tree, swearing at the top of his lungs, and you knew that he was out there working off his anger so he wouldn’t work it off by boxing the boy’s ears. When the child answered back to you, however, he got the back of your hand and no debate. That’s what little boys need, you reckoned. Ondarre is storing up trouble.

‘Careful,’ you’d say as you passed him and his stick, ‘The Boiche think it’s a sin to hit trees.’

When the time came, however, you were both fighting back tears.

‘Now then, little friend,’ Ondarre said, kneeling down on the floor and taking the child’s hands in his huge, rough ones. ‘You know I’ve spoken of the great school down in Elden Root?’ The boy nodded. ‘And you know that you are an extremely clever little lad, and that my friend wants to meet you?’ The boy nodded again. ‘Well, I’m not a particularly clever man, and I’ve now taught you everything I can. So –'

He was unable to go on. His voice had broken completely, his shoulders were shaking silently.

‘It’s time for you to go to school,’ you said, finishing his sentence. ‘It’s time for you to leave here and go and study for your future.’

‘No!’ the boy shouted at you. ‘No!’ he shouted at Ondarre, still weeping in front of him. ‘You said you’d never leave me!’

‘Oh, and I won’t, little one!’ Ondarre insisted, hugging him close. ‘I never will. You will always be able to call for me, and I’ll come, I promise. But me and Auntie Lanwe can’t give you the future you deserve. Boy,’ he said, fighting his way back on top of his grief, ‘I am a fugitive. I am an Exile. So are you. No-one can know we’re here, no-one can know that you are my ward. What can I ever give you? This way, you get to have a life of your own, whatever you want it to be.’ He looked up at you. ‘Which of us gets to be able to do that, now, eh?’

‘Does your friend know who I am?’

‘More or less. But I think you should choose a name for yourself – a new name. What would you like it to be?’

It didn’t look like the boy wanted a new name, but he couldn’t resist the idea of playing dress-up with someone else’s.

‘Uluscant. I want to be called Uluscant, like in the book we’ve been reading.’

You gave him an imploring look: not another ridiculous name. We were drowning in them. Ondarre _and_ Uluscant?

‘Then Uluscant you shall be. But you’ll always be my brave little friend. Promise me that you will remember that, yes?’

More tearful hugging.

‘You’ll visit me often, though, won’t you? I’ll come home sometimes?’

The boy’s face fell when he saw that Ondarre wasn’t nodding. ‘I will visit, but not often. Little one, this is so important: if anyone knows who I am, and that I know you, your life will be in danger.’ The boy couldn’t begin to express how he felt. Neither could Ondarre. They stared at one another, the boy twisting his little hands, Ondarre squatting on his haunches, until you held out a hand towards the child.

‘Come.’

As you picked up his things and walked out the door, the boy asked, ‘Why would anyone want to kill me? I’ve never done anything.’

‘Because people in Nenalata are horrible,’ you said.


	7. Sharp Teeth, Strong Arm

At the height of The Sulk, back in the forest cabin, something happened that changed things for you and for him. No: it changed _him_. In some odd way you’ve never been able to place it changed you too.

What was difficult about this thing that was happening to him, this process of slowly falling apart, was that it wasn’t smooth. Your unhappiness was a constant. You almost prided yourself on its quiet, well-behaved misery. He was more unpredictable. Now you’ve seen what the boy went through, as you and Ondarre and he tried to figure out how to patch his fragile mind up, the ups and downs are less of a mystery. But that was all ahead of you at that stage.

That particular day had been a good one. He had been almost the dashing young officer you fell for again, and he had delighted Niliye and the boy by playing every raucous game you weren’t interested in. After a brief pause for soup they were at it again, the children chasing each other around the room while he tried to grab them, blindfolded. Then Niliye caught her foot on something and went crashing into the table.

The table flew through the front door and landed an impressive number of feet off in the trees. Even Niliye stopped crying when she saw and heard it all.

He seized that huge, sinister sword of his, the stone at its cross-piece flickering weirdly. Then he marched out the door after the table and began to smash the it up. Sometimes it sliced through the wood like a knife through butter. That was when he was concentrating and in control. Sometimes it hammered down upon it like a blunt club. There was a horrible smell like storms in the air, and his face was a rictus of fury.

The children were sobbing and wailing. They were clinging to your skirts. You’d never, never seen Niliye terrified like that, even in the vast Grahtwood at night. You realised you were clinging on to them too, clutching their thin little shoulders to your hips.

A great ball of fiery light ripped through the tree trunks towards you. A deep boom followed it an eerie couple of seconds later, and it made the air in your lungs jump. You gasped for breath.

When your eyes opened he was standing beside the smoking wreckage of the table. There was little of it left: a few charred stumps and some red-hot nails and brackets sizzling in the grass. Twenty paces in every direction the trees had been shorn of their leaves and blackened.

He looked up at you with eyes that do not seem to be his own.

Your husband was a soldier, of course: you knew how they get when they come home. You knew that they never really get the words given to them to explain, and perhaps there aren’t words in Ayleidoon or any other language and that that is as it should be. But your husband wasn’t capable of that. Your husband was morose, then he was drunk, then he’d get into fights, then he’d go away again. He couldn’t rip the fabric of the world apart with his thoughts.

‘Little one!’ he cried out, running towards you and the boy and Niliye. ‘Little one!’

He knelt down and tried to put a hand on their shoulders, but they both wailed harder and shrank away from his touch.

‘Little one!’ he pleaded, beginning to sob too.

There had been times until that afternoon when you thought you’d get him when he was in the soft afterglow of an orgasm and tell him to train the boy as a Pelin after all. It seemed like justice, somehow, and he could strike the blows you never could as the daughter of a poor weaver.

Now it didn’t seem like the solution to anything at all. You watched him meditating that night all alone with his little figure of Trinimac and his ball of light and his demons, and you thought how very broken you all were. You weren’t sure if you could fix him. And then you realised you weren’t sure if you could fix yourself, and you’d surely need to do that first.

That day changed him. He had never obviously thought about anything that came out of his mouth, and he had told you all about his sadness and his feelings of despair. Now he barely spoke to you. You still caught him brooding when he thought he wasn’t being watched, out in the woods. He was sad about many things, you knew, not just the fright he’d given the three of you. There was all the stuff about what had happened in Nenalata. There was the fact he would never see his friends again, or the Aran. Even now, after so much time together, you only feel guilty relief that he didn’t share it any of this with you. The only thing you could compare his silence to was a house with all its shutters closed and its doors locked, but with a fire tearing through every room inside. He was ashamed of what was happening to him.

‘You have to allow me space to attend to my training, Lanwe,’ he announced solemnly, the next day. ‘I have been… changed by the magic I use. I need to commune with the Spirits in my own way, meditate and what have you. I know you don’t trust what I’m up to but I need my sword to do that, I need my helm.’

‘Not in the house,’ you snapped, slamming the jars of shopping on the table. ‘I don’t want those things in my house.’

And those were the last words you shared on the matter for many years.

 

 

When the pirates came to Velyn you were in town, as it happened. You were out early, fetching flowers for a party Niliye and Ondarre wanted to have; a sort of Vigyld feast, but without actual Vigyld. It was Niliye’s birthday too, so you and Ondarre had promised her a honeycake and real Colovian wine.

A rider came clattering through the market place, scattering customers and townspeople. He was down from the beacon up on the hills above the Strid estuary. He ran into the town hall, and then the rumours started to fly. Apparently this was something that had happened before. Like the tide going out the market place emptied of life. You ran every step of the long walk home.

He and Niliye were working their way through an Aldmeri grammar table in their dressing gowns, both equally confused and non-plussed. He’d said he’d teach her, then it became clear that he couldn’t really remember too much Aldmeri after all, and then they’d started taking lessons together from a wizened old soothsayer who claimed to be a wrongfully exiled priest.

‘But the Camoran guard must have been called out,’ he protested. You had told him to go straight to the town and take matters in hand.

‘The Camorans couldn’t keep a rat out of a pantry. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that’s why they let the Ayleidoon build along the coast here. There’s no point waiting for them to do something about it, because they won’t.’

‘But I don’t know how to defend a Boiche town!’ he howled, stomping up the steps to the bedrooms above the courtyard. You pursued him into your own little chamber and watched him start to put his clothes on.

‘You’re a soldier!’ you insisted, shaking him by the shoulders. ‘You’re a Pelin: you’re an officer, an elite bodyguard of the House of Dynar. What in Nirn do you mean, you don’t know how?’

‘I’m a swordsman, a follower of the Old Ways, Lanwe, but someone else always did the planning!’

‘Who?’

‘Adaesi. Relle, maybe. Usually Laloriaran himself. I just did what I was told.’

There was a moment where you both stood and stared at each other; his tunic was slumped around his neck with one arm through it; your dress billowed gently in the breeze from the Strid.

Then you slapped him across the cheek. He gasped in pain and surprise.

‘This is horseshit, Ondarre! There’s no-one else. Go and do something.’

‘But I’m an idiot!’

‘… Perhaps you are. But there’s still no-one else.’

‘What if people see what I can do and put things together, Lanwe? What if they see my sword an-‘

‘Oh please, Ondarre! Where’s your sense of honour now, eh? If you loved me, if you loved Niliye, you’d go and take that fucking sword of yours and not even think about it. You’d go out and skewer every last one of those pasty-faced scum with it!’

‘You hate my sword!’ he protested. His arm was still through the hole in his tunic. ‘I’m not allowed to go near it! I’m out of practice, I’ve neglected my discipline.’

You stepped up to him and jabbed a finger in his face. You practically rammed it up his nose. ‘If you cared about me and Niliye, you’d find the strength and the brains from somewhere, Ondarre. You’d look those evil shits in the eye, see what they were and annihilate them like you annihilated that table back in the woods.’

You would normally expect him to slope off and do what he is told after a speech like that – there are certain things that are non-negotiables with you, and he knows it – but this time he simply shook his head. ‘You think that’s how it works, Lanwe?’ he said sadly. ‘You think it just comes and goes conveniently like lighting and snuffing a candle?’ He gestured towards the door, and to the harbour beyond. ‘Go on then, Lanwe, you lead. If that’s how it works; there are some people who deserve to be skewered and some people who don’t and that’s all there is to it. You show the way.’

Of course, to this day you really have no idea how it works, whatever “it” may be. But you have a bloody good idea how it ought to work.

‘Look at the size of you!’ you barked. ‘Then look at the size of me!’

‘It’s nothing to do with size, Lanwe –‘

‘I am the mother of your daughter, Ondarre…’ Because he did think of her as his daughter. And you knew that he would fear for her like nobody else in Velyn. ‘There are nine ships,’ you added, with quiet menace. 'Even if we're safe here they'll plunder the harbour and ruin us.'

He refused to look you in the eye, but his mouth twisted in that way he has as if tasting something bitter-sour. ‘Which way is the wind coming from?’

‘The north: from the Nagamath desert.’

He nodded, pulled the tunic over his head and sighed.

‘Sometimes what counts in these things is to see a bloody big man with a bloody big sword, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’

‘If I go and get ready, will you think of something for me to say to whoever I find down in the town?’

‘I will.’ You felt more relief than you expected, and you realised that meant you had also been more afraid than you allowed yourself to acknowledge. ‘I’ll go and get that chest with your armour out of the store room.‘ You ran off towards the steps down to the courtyard. You were stopped by his voice calling out from your bedroom.

‘Not the armour, Lanwe: not the helm.’

‘But you’ll be sliced to pieces!’

‘I won’t; it’s mostly a back-up, for show. The real work is done here.’ He tapped a finger against his temple. ‘People will recognise it, and then what will happen?’

‘What, a bunch of Abecean pirates will know about Nenalata armour?’

‘No. But the locals might. We don’t know where any of these ships trade with. I can’t take the risk.’

Once he was kitted out he looked different, somehow. Having a sword on his hip again made another person’s spirit seem to ghost his body. He looked dangerous, handsome, and foreign: he looked like your lover again, not your non-spouse.

He took both your hands in his, kissed them in turn and then pulled them to him. There was doubt and something between anxiety and fear in his lovely turquoise eyes.

‘Lanwe… Tell me truthfully… I need to know.’ You nodded, and waited for whatever it was that could have him so worried. What do the Pelinia ask of their lovers for before battle, you wondered? A thousand hopes and fears flew through your head, each as awesome and terrible as the last.

‘Am I fat?’

Words were not adequate for the new parade of thoughts running through your head. ‘I know I’m not _fat_ ,’ he explained, ‘But do I look _fatter_?’

‘No,’ you said. He shuffled a little, and braced his shoulders a few times to weigh up the sword. ‘Do I?’

‘No.’

‘Well, at least we’ll both make beautiful corpses.’

 

You only have other people’s descriptions of what happened down by the harbour that day. He didn’t really talk about it. The more other people talked about it – raved about it, enthused about him, wondered at his skill and daring – the more he retreated into silence. Then other people from other places started debating the meaning of it all. Was the lesson of the whole thing that sixty poorly armed men and women and boys and girls from a small harbour can see off nine Maormer pirate sloops if they have a skilled leader? Was it that sixty amateur soldiers can see off anyone in the entire world if they are motivated enough, motivated by love for home and hearth? Was it that all you really need is one genius swordsman, blessed by the Gods or the Spirits depending on your profession, who can walk on water and conjure squalling winds to ruin the ships’ formation and power down their sails? Arguments raged. People with grand theories about things like naval warfare, meri nature and the right way to run the world wrote pamphlets about it. He didn’t read them and neither did you.

Whatever might be the truth of what happened out there at Velyn, it wasn’t discrete. As time’s gone on you’ve realised that the Aran must know full well where his Fyrre is and what he’s up to. If the stories about Dynar are true – and you suspect more and more that they’re only the beginning – then it would be the work of moments to find him, hunt him down and kill him. But he never comes for him. He never troubles you. It is as if he loves your Ondarre as much as Ondarre loves the Aran.

This only makes things worse.

 

One day a priestess from some temple somewhere or other in Ilayas turned up asking to see Ondarre. He was out with Niliye at the time, so you took her into the garden and gave her tea: she’d come a long way, she explained, so she was happy to wait. She made extensive small talk about the garden and it turned out she was a priestess of Jephre. You don’t know much about gardens – you hired a person to do it – so you were very relieved to see Ondarre come into the little square courtyard looking confused and worried.

‘Word travels,’ the priestess explained. ‘You are apparently secretly a great soldier.’

Ondarre’s face froze in panic. His mouth hung open and his face went ashen. The priestess began to realise that he wasn’t going to respond, then she started to wonder what was going on, then she glanced over at you.

‘My husband was a mercenary. During the Slave War. But he doesn’t like to talk about it.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I don’t like to talk about it.’

You were both now of the age where people couldn’t tell if you were a haggard forty or an extremely well-preserved one hundred. It was plausible.

The priestess nodded sadly. ‘I understand. I came to ask if you would be interested in taking a contract, however. We need someone to sort out the security arrangements at the temple in Ilayas. Things are…’ She took a prim little sip of her tea and frowned into the cup. ‘Unacceptable.’

‘What’s wrong with the arrangements you already have?’ he asked.

‘It’s not so much what’s wrong with them, as what we do next,’ she explained. ‘There are sharp differences of opinion how best to spend our dwindling donations. We’ve decided it would be best to get an expert in to tell us. Settle it that way.’

So he took the contract, after much prodding on your part, and he turned out to do a rather good job of it. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he complained to you, ‘The sensible solution’s perfectly clear, even to a layperson, and they just want me to tell them what they already know.’

‘Just take the money, Ondarre. Don’t whinge about it.’

The fact is he is good with people. More than anything, he’s good at getting people who can’t stand to be in the same room as each other to sort themselves out and get on with things. That’s all he thinks he’s really doing. You think he’s probably a better soldier than he gives himself credit for, but it is true that he has an unerring knack for making everyone feel useful and valued. Even when they’re not useful or valuable. He’s extremely good at getting the useless and talentless to butt out without them realising it. That is a priceless gift.

‘You’re the man of the moment,’ you said, pressing your breasts against his side. You were lying in bed and he was trying to drift off to sleep. He’d spent a day in the saddle coming back from another person who wanted to pick his brains.

‘Hmmph,’ he grunted.

‘They’re saying you could do well in Ilayas, you know –‘

‘You don’t want to live in Ilayas.’

‘… No. I don’t. Not really, but… In the long term…’

‘ _I_ don’t want to live in Ilayas.’

‘But in the long term…’

‘What is this “long-term”, Lanwe?’ he muttered, turning over onto his side. ‘Is this about Niliye?’

‘In a way. It’s about… respectability.’ He made a sarcastic little “ha!” sound. Like any good aristocrat, he doesn’t give a fig for respectability. ‘Rebellion is all good and well when you’re children yourselves, but…’

You watched him for a bit, wanting him to turn back over and tell you that he understood. You weren’t quite sure what you wanted him to understand, but you wanted him to say it anyway. ‘We could get married.’

‘Can’t get married,’ he insisted. ‘Need the permission of the Aran. Can’t get married.’

‘But –'

‘You can’t get married. You’re married to someone else already.’

‘They don’t know that.’

‘Everyone thinks we’re already married. We can’t get married again, can we?’

You stopped yourself before you began, because you knew where this was going to end. That’s why you’d never bothered to say it.

You know that you are never going back to Nenalata, not as a woman and not as a couple. You know that you don’t want to and that what you have with him – your life together - is impossible there. It is possible here. So you will stay.

He thinks differently, and he starts from a different place. He is a Pelin. He swore an oath on his blood or his soul or whichever part of himself he reckons it was today that he would serve his Aran to the death. Well, he’s not dead yet.

He does not see the thing he is saying by staying silent.

Only someone who wants to go back calls himself an exile. Otherwise you say you live somewhere new.

He still lives in Nenalata.

Or at least, that is what you assume he was thinking, because you never asked.


	8. Eldhaal

Mostly you were happy and you were certainly comfortable. By your standards if not his. It helped you slowly relax, without realising it: security again. You suspect that was why the baby happened when it did.

Impending fatherhood did nothing to mellow him; his swagger only got wider, his grin even broader, his voice louder. ‘Whatever you want, you can have it,’ he insisted, bouncing you on his knee. ‘Just say the word.’ But all you wanted was to sleep and perhaps have some smoked artichokes, which the more religious Boiche didn’t approve of.

He wasn’t having any of it. Doctors were called, which meant putting them up for the night, which meant eating and drinking and telling stories, which meant him turning the house upside down and being loud and gregarious. You had come to take pride in the hospitality you could offer people, but you never felt completely at ease at the dinner table with scholars and aristocrats. You preferred the hedge-witches and midwives of the Boiche, although he thought them insanitary. You submitted to the poking and prodding of the physicians, but when he went out you got the wisewoman and her ointments to call. The stuff made out of beetle shells for stretchmarks actually worked, to your surprise.

When he found out you were expecting he went straight to Ilayas to commission an architect. No heir of the House of Fyrre will be born in a house without a bath, apparently.

Now you could sit in your enormous bath, feeling enormous, getting even more enormous. The enormity of everything and of you seemed to make him proud. The escapade in Velyn showed that there will always be a part of him that lives life on an epic scale, loud enough for every potentate in Cyrodiil to hear. Your life had become something you would never have imagined when you were a child in the silk workshop. You used to feel inadequate: now it just exhausted you. You couldn’t help but feel a little bitter, too: the world never spared a thought for you or Niliye when you were carrying her.

She had left home. Things had not been right between you for some time and the baby only made it more obvious. She and Ondarre still seemed to have the same sweet bond as ever, however: it was him she turned to when she wanted to join a temple. You told her she’d be better off finding a nice boy and settling down. ‘Why ever would she want to do that?’ he laughed. ‘I know how this stuff works, and I’m telling you: she’ll be running the entire city within a few years.’

You and Niliye had a fight you still regret. She called you needy and controlling. You couldn’t will yourself to let go of her, though. All through that dreadful summer and the long journey to your little house in the woods outside Silvenar she was the only living soul you could trust. It took many months before Ondarre could persuade her to come home for a visit.

 

While you were pregnant you became aware that he was slipping out at night. At first you were sure he was having an affair: the Boiche don’t approve of it but he is an Ayleid aristocrat. It would be normal and his right. His sort are not like yours. So you followed him.

And he was having an affair, of sorts. He would go to the room above the stables and take down the long, specially-made chest he keeps his armour in. He would bow his head and begin rites that you didn’t even know the name for. That surprised you, because his lack of piety has always shocked you. He calls your devotions “peasant superstitions”.

He would meditate for hours then, with a strange look in his eye you both recognised and feared, he would begin to swing that mighty sword of his. He would dance with it in the moonlight. They are steps you do not know but which exist before speech and before thought to him. Watching him you realised you felt very alone, and it was an aloneness which has always been there. Forty-odd years had done nothing to allay it: _there will always be a part of him which does not belong to me_.

The man you live with, who built this house with you, who raised your daughter with you, he is only a shadow of the man you saw in front of you then. There was a thing in him you remember from that very first day you saw him in the wide streets of Nenalata. It was a caged animal, a beast at bay. It had sharp claws and a bloody maw. There would always be a part of him which belongs only to the Spirits and the sword.

While you were watching him you felt the baby kick for the first time. Earlier than with Niliye: they say that boys kick first. Well, you decided, I won’t let him take my boy away from me. You wouldn’t let him push the child through that door if you couldn’t open it too. He would not become _one of them_.

Then, twelve summers ago, Eldhaal arrived.

‘I’m not going to call a son that. It’s ridiculous.’

‘It’s not. He should be given an honourable name, a name of kings. He is heir to the House of Fyrre.’

‘No he’s not. He’s heir to nothing… and a bastard.’

But when the child arrived, when he held his son aloft and leaned in to whisper the names of his Ancestors in his ear so they would know him and he would know them, the words stuck in his throat. He stared at the squalling, red thing cradled in his fists and seemed to forget how to speak.

‘Hurry up,’ you said, ‘I’m exhausted and he’s going to get cold. Get on with it.’

But all he did was kiss the tiny forehead in front of him and place him back on your breast.

‘His name, Ondarre!’ you insisted. ‘His Ancestors!’

‘I don’t know who they are,’ he replied sadly, and walked out of the room.

It was at that point you realised that not only had your handsome aristocrat turned out to be less fun than you had thought, but he didn’t even come with a guarantee that he was his father’s son. Somehow that felt like a betrayal.

 

You were happy, though, once the shock of everything that happened and everything you learned that day had passed. Some of your fondest memories are of the three of you cocooned in the madness and discovery of the first weeks of Eldhaal’s life. Ondarre was fascinated by every minute detail of every routine as if he was a visitor in some bizarre and exotic country. He'd left home so early and he was an only child. Children never spent much time with their parents in his world in any case.

‘My son is even more handsome than he was two weeks ago!’ he beamed, holding the child up above you both in the bed to take a look at him. The infant squirmed like a grub. ‘If he keeps this up, he’ll be the handsomest being in the world by the time he’s six months old!’

‘All babies look the same,’ you pointed out, ‘And you wouldn’t look yourself if you’d spent nine months covered in snotty water.’

But the boy was handsome, just like his father. As she’d grown it had become clear that Niliye had more than a little of your husband in her. She’s a pretty girl, but quirky. Eldhaal was perfect; radiantly beautiful. You couldn’t help but suspect that Niliye would have the easier life. You are beautiful and Ondarre is too, and just look where that got you.


	9. Mara

He caught you praying to the little statue of Mara tonight. You heard his feet on the steps up to the gallery outside your room but you didn’t manage to put out the candles in time. The scent of incense was thick in the air, and you couldn’t pretend you’d been airing the clothes chests this time.

‘What’s this? What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ you said. ‘Just thinking of Niliye.’

Ever since you found out the Aran is dead you have been praying to Mara to give you another child. Your thinking is difficult to put into words, but it’s something about wanting to remind him that life goes on and life is here, with you.

He didn’t look as if he quite believed you, but he started to pull off his clothes and climb into bed, ready for your nightly performance.

This has gone on for weeks. He doesn’t sleep and he doesn’t ever seem to be able to settle to anything. He’s only ever half-listening and you don’t know how to talk to him about what is really on his mind. When he thinks you’ve drifted off he gets up and stares mournfully out the window to the East, to the Lady, to Nenalata and her stars.

You watch him in silence normally, but tonight you open your mouth and say what you have thought for sixty years.

‘I hope the King is dead.’

He doesn’t move at all. Only his head turns to you, silhouetted against the bright Valenwood moons.

‘What?’ the brown-gold shadow in the casement says.

‘I hope the King is dead,’ you repeat. You are actually quite calm, because this is the truth as you see it. ‘And it makes no difference to me what happens in Nenalata. Why should it? It never cared about me.’

‘Laloriaran…’ He can barely say the name. ‘Laloriaran Dynar is not dead. I would know.’

You decide you don’t want to know how he would be so sure. ‘I’m amazed you care.’

He shakes his head and the moonlight catches his profile. We are still young, you think. We are still young and beautiful, even after everything. He is certainly still the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. He is still the kindest person you ever met. ‘Lanwe… What has happened to you? He’s your Aran!’

‘He might be yours, but he is not mine. And he shouldn’t be yours.’

‘I swore an oath to protect him to my death and I’m not dead yet. Even if sometimes I feel I am.’

That was cruel. He can be cruel and surprisingly clever about it, too. He is beginning to look angry now, which means that inside he is furious. ‘He is my friend, my lover, my commander –'

‘Was, Ondarre. Was these things. Then he exiled you. Your mother disinherited you. All because he was going to kill a five-year-old boy and you stopped him. I’ve heard all the things he did: locking people up, killing his Commander, spitting in the faces of the priests… And Nenalata made me suffer so many times, in so many ways, if you care about that.’

‘He had to! He had to do all of these things or even worse things would happen! I’m the one who broke the rules, Lanwe! And I had to do that too!’

You make a “tcha” sound like the Boiche and burrow down under the sheets.

‘You will never understand, will you?’ he says. The sudden sadness in his voice makes you sit up again.

‘No.’ You hope he knows that you are telling him an important piece of information now, not arguing. ‘No, I will never understand you people and the way you torture everyone. Yourselves included.’

‘ _Us people?_ ’

‘Because I’m so low and common, just like your mother warned you.’ You are back to arguing.

‘You honestly think that? After all this time?’ he exclaims, standing up and walking over to the bed. His features take shape as the moons retreat. ‘Do you have any idea how many risks I took to right the mess I - we - made of your life? I may not get things right first time but I pay my debts, Lanwe. Do you ever think that Laloriaran did not need to do any of this, that there were terrible things happening in Nenalata at the time; _terrible_ things? He may not be perfect but we don’t live in a perfect world. He _tried_ , Lanwe. He cared enough for me and for you and for Niliye to give you another chance. He gave you a second life, and you’re hoping the only one he’ll ever have has been cut short.’

You’ve never heard him talk to you like this. You’ve never talked to him like this either, though.

He looks down at you with a venom you’ve only seen before when he’s playing the ball game. ‘You will never understand what it means to look after more than yourself and the things you need, will you? Me, Laloriaran, Nenya –'

‘Nenya?’

‘The Arana. We have to look after everything before ourselves. We have no choice but to see the world from the outside in. You just see it from the inside out.’

He waits for you to say something, but you realise that it would be much wiser to stay silent. He hates silence. It always means he wonders what he’s done wrong.

‘I love you.’

That’s all he says as he walks out the door. You listen for a long time to him moving about below, then you drift off to sleep.

 

In the morning you find the note you have been trying to make him write for nearly a month now:

_Dearest, dearest Lanwe,_

_I am a Pelin of Welke and of Nenalata. I have a duty to protect my Aran as he protects his people. It is more than a job, Lanwe: it is a sacred duty, written on my bones and my mind in my own blood._

_Nenalata needs me. Karanenya needs me. And I know that Laloriaran is alive and needs me to protect his people until he finds a way to come home. There are dark forces at work in our world, Lanwe, and while I don’t pretend to understand them I do believe in them. It is not enough to say that they are not yet at our front door and that we are happy. Nothing but the Strid River separates us from the Empire: I fear if I do not help Nenalata one day they could destroy my new home too._

_I know you will hate me for leaving, and I know that you will be sure that I will not come back. You’ve been trying to prove that this is who I am for many years now. Perhaps you’re right, but I hope not._

_All I can say is that there are some people who we are bound to for our mortal lives, even if we are nowhere near them or if they cause us pain. Laloriaran is one such person. But Lanwe, you are another. So is Niliye. So is my son, our son. He knew about this, and helped me plan it. Niliye has found me a fast horse. Please: don’t be angry at them._

_I will come back._

_Ondarre Fyrre, Head of the House of Fyrre of Welke, Pelin of Nenalata, Your Beloved_

In the weeks to come Niliye will tell you why she betrayed your trust. ‘You can run wherever you want, Ama,’ she will say, ‘You can change your name and burn everything that reminds you of the past, but none of it means you’re not angry any more. I am sick of living with your anger. Until what Nenalata means to us changes, Ama, we will only ever be exiles. That’s where Uncle Ondarre’s gone: to finish what’s been left undone.’

 

They say the Ancestors – the Aedra as they call us here – do not answer prayers. This is not true. We do, but in subtle ways that reflect our presence in creation. Your prayer is easy to answer though, Lanwe: I have not given you another child.

I have not given you a baby because you are right. He is the brave, devoted man you always want him to prove himself to be: Lord Fyrre would stay with you and I do not want him to. You are my child, as are all mortals, but my blood flows in the Aran’s veins. Fyrre loves my descendant and few others ever will. That is my interest in him, it is why I made his mother betray her vows and placed a child in her.

He is my power made flesh, Lanwe; you feel it when he holds you, when he moves in you, when the sweet warmth of his breath kisses your skin. He is in Nirn to do my work, and I made him handsome, rich and deadly so he could. Ondarre Fyrre is compelled to act for me. It is not my concern if he makes no sense to other mortals.

Many thousands living and yet to be born need him to go to Dynar now, love him and believe in him. One day my son the Aran must speak for Nirn and all its mortal souls, and I intend to guide him there. Your sadness is real but so small compared to that.

I know you grew up in a world where there was never enough of anything, but love is not something that can run out or we can hoard against lean times. Love is not a thing outside of you, to be bartered with or bought or sold.

There are cults in the Imperial City now who preach that my love is passive, benign and meek. They misunderstand. Love belongs to the Exile, the orphan and the refugee as much as the matron. Love is the knock on our door in the middle of the night. Love compels us to defy our duty, our elders and our friends. Love destroys empires and razes cities to the ground. Love is not the most powerful force in the Aurbis, Lanwe, but it is the most dangerous.


End file.
